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Partitionate Macintosh HD fails

C

ChrisBuchholz

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 22, 2010
24
0
Hey,

I have tried, both with Boot Camp-assistant and Disk Utility, to partitionate my Macintosh HD.

It has got about 250gb of which I have 78gb free. I tried to set the size of the new partition to 50gb, but it each time the operation fails, not giving any good reasons to why other than I should try again.

What can be wrong here? Do I do something wrong?

Thanks,
ChrisBuchholz
 
right, you probably should use the boot disc. running disc utility while booted from the DVD should allow you to partition your HD no problem...although i did recently partition my drive while i was booted from it and it worked fine
 
I have now tried again with Disk Utility but this time from the Install DVD and with both the new partition as 50gb and 32gb. Neither worked. Just said it failed and I should try with a smaller size.

What can be wrong?
 
Disk Utility will only resize volumes that are HFS+ (Journaled), and cannot move things (only resize, create, and delete). I also do not know if it works on partition maps other than GPT.
 
"I have tried, both with Boot Camp-assistant and Disk Utility, to partitionate my Macintosh HD.
It has got about 250gb of which I have 78gb free. I tried to set the size of the new partition to 50gb, but it each time the operation fails, not giving any good reasons to why other than I should try again.
What can be wrong here? Do I do something wrong?"

I'm going to _guess_ that the data on your UNpartitioned volume is highly fragmented and scattered all around the drive's sectors. Disk Utility "sees" this and refuses the attempt (however, it doesn't give you an alert as to WHY it rejected the attempt).

You _might_ be able to overcome this by using a utility to DEfragment your drive before the attempt to partition it.

"iDefrag" works well at doing this, the "compact" feature might do just what you need -- that is, move all the "loose data" towards the beginning of the drive, leaving the "rear end" clear so that it is ready for the new partition.

Another thought: With only 78gig free, you really shouldn't be partitioning the remainder of the drive, unless you intend for the second partition to be relatively small. The Mac OS needs a fair amount of "free space" on the drive with which to do its thing, that is to keep the invisible virtual memory file, maintain logs and caches, etc.

With 78gig "free", you _might_ get away with a second partition of, say, 25gig, but I wouldn't try to make it any larger than that.

Solution:
Simple one -- get a BIGGER drive, and partition it from the get-go. Then move your existing data over.
 
Thank you for your replies . I ended up just formating my HD and then making the partitions. Thought it would be nice with a clean OS X installation :p
 
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